


Like A Sinner Redeemed

by bubblegumboi (Hawkbringer)



Series: Hawkbringer's Greatest Hits [6]
Category: Jack et la mécanique du cœur | Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Blood and Torture, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Corpse Desecration, Grief Jewelry, Grief/Mourning, Heartbreak, M/M, Making Out, Other, Possessive Behavior, Rape, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Seriously Dark, Set at the Extraodinarium, Suicide, Which is unusual for me, except there is no resurrection, fetishization of destruction, lack of empathy, murder sort of but more like assisted suicide, that should be a tag, what is it called when a corpse disintegrates over time?, yeah there's that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 09:27:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18775477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawkbringer/pseuds/bubblegumboi
Summary: The fight between Joe and Jack at the Extraordinarium just as Acacia is leaving with the key to Jack's heart, reimagined as the climactic moment of Jack's life... and also of Joe's. (Mind the tags)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I discovered this movie in the kid's section of my local library. I watched it all the way through. I had to cope by writing hate-sex because MY GOD, FRENCH CINEMA IS DEPRESSING. I also told a librarian in person when I returned the DVD, that this shouLD NOT BE IN THE KID'S SECTION BECAUSE IT FEATURES FRICKIN SUICIDE. Doesn't mean it's not a good movie. I saw the English dub, couldn't bear to watch it through completely a second time in French with subs, though the puns immediately made more sense, the first one I noticed being child and ice cube being 'garcon'.
> 
> My original author's notes from March 2015, preserved in full, including the list of alternative titles I brainstormed:
> 
> After Jack and the Cuckoo Clock Heart, I really need some hatesex with him and Joe. FUCKING JOE. IS THAT HIS REAL NAME IN THE FRENCH VERSION? FUCK. Well, probably, since it was set starting in Edinburgh, and Acacia or however it's spelled sounds vaguely Spanish. If she's Spanish. No, wait. I have no fucking clue. I JUST NEED JACK TO FUCKING SHRED THE TALLER GUY'S CLOTHES AND BITE A CHUNK OUT OF HIS LIP AND FUCKING /KILL/ JOE BY STABBING HIM IN THE CHEST WITH THAT SOLID-ASS CUCKOO THING. FUCKING JOE. THAT IS SO NOT A GOOD NAME. IT SHOULD BE EDWARD. FUCK.
> 
> JUST WRECK HIM. I THINK THE HOMESTUCKS HAVE A NAME FOR THAT KIND OF HATESEX SHIT. CUZ THERE'RE FOUR KINDS OF ROMANCE OR WHATEVER. CRAZY-ASS TROLLS. SHEESH.
> 
> (Shitty one-word title goes here.)  
> Not your typical battle of wits  
> Sestina - n. Difficult and rare form of rhyming game.  
> A Many Splendored Thing  
> A Taste for Iron  
> Ebony and Wood  
> Black and Burnt All Over  
> Blasted, Black, and Burnt  
> Charred Ebony (best one so far)  
> The Singular Thermodynamic Reaction Of Ebony, Iron, and Fire (is okay)  
> One Final Game  
> Losing the Battle of Wits (no, too obvious)  
> His Final Game (also works)  
> If God Was A Clockmaker, What Does That Make You? (also okay)  
> Blackest, Sand-Strewn Night  
> A Heart Like The Desert in Evening - Sand-Strewn and Black as Ebony (also okay)  
> Never Give Up - Never Surrender ('s a fuckin' galaxy quest quote)  
> Never Surrender (mediocre, could do in a pinch. I like Charred Ebony better)  
> Never Better (also good)  
> Like a Sinner Redeemed (pretty good) (has the added bonus of being a quote /from/ the fic)  
> Ebony Burning (a bit too pretentious. I think I'll stick with Sinner Redeemed.)
> 
> So there you go.

Neither of them noticed when the fight devolved from fisticuffs to snogging against the nearest vertical surface - someone's wooden trailer - and neither of them cared.

Joe's bleeding lip haphazardly decorated Jack's pale skin as he savaged the shorter man's infuriatingly beautiful face with his teeth. His own lips none too idle, Jack thoroughly applied himself to sucking a bright purple bruise into the sallow greyness of his archnemisis' neck. He had hardly been given the chance to retreat and admire his handiwork, so Jack could only guess how well the effort was going.

Smoke rose and poured in great clouds from Jack's ravaged mechanical heart, making him pause and hiss as the gears caught and slipped off each other. Breaking away from the wraith's neck to pant and groan in pain, Joe merely groaned lustily in response. Jack winced at the realization. Of course Joe had only ever enjoyed experiencing Jack's pain second-hand. Or, not quite pain; it was more the feeling that things were slowly breaking, things he needed to keep himself alive. Jack wasn't sure he could feel anything anymore, Acacia's rejection having ripped everything from him. She was leaving, was seconds from leaving - he looked up, side to side, desperately - she was gone. Her suitcase had even been picked up where it fell. Joe's carriage was waiting, but the Frenchman's was nowhere in sight. 

That realization made his chest seize with pain again, that his closest friend had left with the love of his life in the few seconds he had been distracted by... 

Joe snarled, observing his consolation prize failing to pay attention to its new owner. To remedy this, he seized the man beneath his arms and hauled him straight up into the air. Jack gasped prettily, but seemed only interested in looking around at anything _but_ the man holding him aloft. 

Simply to keep his own arms from tiring, Joe slammed his enemy's back hard into the wooden wall behind them, earning a miffed shout from inside, which both men ignored. Still failing to catch his toy's attention, Joe lowered his head and focused his single eye upon the clockwork heart now directly in front of it. With bared teeth, he leaned forward... And delicately plucked the hands from the clockface.

THAT got the smaller man's attention sure enough. He shouted and writhed and clutched Joe's head between both his hands. With his lips mere inches from the inner workings of Jack's soul, Joe smirked. Grasping the single protruding piece of clockwork the hands had once spun upon with equal delicacy between his bone-white teeth, Joe tugged. 

The clock face fell open, as it had so many times to this man, this villain. Jack shivered and protested and squealed like a hot-blooded virgin. In return, Joe let a purr slip between his teeth. Careful to twist his head to avoid any potential contact with the still-shuttered cuckoo behind those tiny doors, Joe abandoned all reasonable caution and lapped at the sharp edges of the gears in Jack's heart. 

Of course they cut him and as his teeth stained red, Joe found he didn't care. He thrust in deeper and failed to twist his head as steeply and thus, when his tongue slid against something particularly _sensitive_ in those inner workings, drawing a gasp from his nemesis, Joe caught the fierce bite of the tiny cuckoo yet again, this time less dramatically. It merely sliced across his temple, vengefully ripping flesh as it went. His skull bled, thick and fast, and even Jack's eyes narrowed in fear and sympathy as Joe pulled back, groaning. Jack slid to the dust-covered ground as Jack put a hand to his head and looked at his own blood-covered fingers.

For a few seconds, the two star-crossed lovers panted and bled and stared at each other, with no inkling of the other's next move.

Without a word, Jack tugged closed the face of his clock-heart, not that it mattered much with the key in another's possession and the clock's hands missing. Then he threw both his arms around Joe's neck and tugged hard on the handfuls of hair he could reach, dragging the giant down to his level. When he got there, stooped and half a second from kneeling, Jack kissed him. Full on the bloodied, pockmarked lips. His heart protested, loudly, with infuriated clinks and clatters, but it did not explode. Jack did not die. 

Indeed, he had never felt so very much like he was living.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted to my tumblr, hawkbringerandstubby. Every chapter is a functional ending place, the way I've written it. You continue to the very end, you get nothing but nausea, existential dread, and grief. Much like how I felt after finishing the movie, not knowing there was a book version with a different ending until I began posting this fic here and did some research for spelling purposes...


	2. Chapter 2

With no hands ticking away the minutes, the hours, the days, the silence and the wind their only companions this late into the night, it may as well have been a moment out of time. The two of them kissed. Deeply and thoroughly enough to have been the end of some great dramatic novel. To have started a new life. 

But it did none of those things as the two of them came up for air. In the final analysis, it didn't matter at all. 

{Nothing they could do would matter, because Acacia was fleeing with the Cameraman Magician, further and further away across the Continent, and she would not remember for _days_ what that key belonged to and by then, she would be entirely too late. Her love's corpse had been picked clean by the buzzards when she returned to the last place she saw him, and when the tall boy she had once known in school delivered the news, she believed him, because there was something in his voice, in the way he turned away too quickly and lingered too long. Something like regret. But then he left as well, his final duty done, and though the boy who shared his birthday was never forgotten between them, there was nothing else to bind them for the rest of their days.}

No surrender had ever tasted as sweet, no conquest as savory, as when Jack opened his eyes with a flutter and fixed them upon nothing but _Joe._ Wanting nothing but to make him make that face again, Joe dipped his head a second time, only getting halfway there before the frail man's fist cracked across his jaw.

It barely made him stumble back, but it did reopen his ripped-into lip, and the blood upon his chin was something Jack just _had_ to sample. His hands fisted in Joe's lapels, one of them scrabbling to tear off that ruffled ascot, Jack swung his face towards Joe's with all the meekness of an English bulldog. 

Incensed, Joe laid hands of violence upon him again, ripping at bits of him, begging wordlessly for him to submit, to give him that face again, to look up worshipfully, adoringly, _just one more goddamn time._


	3. Chapter 3

Joe never got his wish. 

Even as he sank the boy down onto his dry cock, hard from all the fist-swingings and hand-clawings. 

Even as Jack's eyelids fluttered and his face _glowed_ and he stared up to heaven like a sinner redeemed. 

He never surrendered. 

Even when Joe released inside of him and pulled out and dropped his squelchy, filthy body to the hot sand, contemplating what to do with him next - perhaps remove a few limbs? Start with an eye or two? - Jack took his fate into his own hands. 

With fingertips bleeding, shredding on the gears, he pulled out piece after piece from the clockwork organ he dared to call his _heart_ , and slowly, jerkily, wound down. 

His arms moved like a puppet's in the last few moments, and Joe was struck by how close to death his school-yard manglings had once brought the smaller boy. He didn't feel much of anything about that, now. He was older and wiser, after all, and knew how to finish things he'd started.

Presently, it dawned on him that none of the gears in the pile Jack had pulled from his chest were moving. 

Neither were any of the few still lodged inside. 

Neither was the younger man breathing. 

With a soft grunt of realization, that he was too late to play any further games, Joe knelt down and squatted over Jack's hips, and put his hands out to the sides and leaned in close to inspect the damage. From a far off vantage point, from the perspective of someone who never wore the glasses she should, it might have looked like a romantic scene. Joe recognized this, and told himself he was only finishing what the little piece of shit was too weak to do himself - completely remove all of his gears. 

So Joe did it. 

Piece by piece, with fingers barely damaged, the gears no longer alive, no longer dangerous. As his final act of desecration, he spread his hand inside the emptied cavity and attempted to wrench the infernal wooden machine from his enemy's chest. This _worked_ , if not quite the way Joe had pictured, dragging bits of blood and bone and flesh behind it, leaving the hole jagged and raw. Joe very briefly considered putting the clock back in, but decided against it and tossed the thing into the road where hopefully it would get run over by a horseless carriage shortly. 

Heaving a great sigh, Joe gathered up the rapidly-paling body over his shoulders and left the Extraordinarium, scouting by moonlight for the best place to leave the body.


	4. Chapter 4

When he checked on it in the morning, the buzzards had already gotten to the eyes. Joe smiled at the fitting irony of it, and returned to take his enemy's place beside the Coffin Woman and wait for Acacia's return. He never once glanced at the mangled hole in the body's chest, never once saw the true form of his closest enemy's heart. 

By the next day, the bones were picked almost clean. 

By the third, scavengers, probably from the Extraordinarium itself, had spirited away his clothing. 

On the fourth, Acacia arrived. 

Joe explained the outcome and nothing of his behavior and outright refused to take the key. 

He watched as Acacia fashioned herself a necklace from it and struggled to convince himself that it wasn't an insult to Jack's memory that he be remembered for what fate took from him, not what he took from fate. 

He never quite succeeded, and when he left the place, the pile of gears of unknown origin - which had been left undisturbed, probably because none of the local population had any clue what to do with them - found itself missing only one of its original 232 pieces. Joe wore his hand-fashioned ring for far longer than Acacia wore her necklace.


End file.
